Casino Royale 1967 Vs 2006
- May 16, 2020 Plus, Fleming had sold the movie rights of Casino Royale to producer Gregory Ratoff in 1955. Eon Productions, run by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, purchased the rights to the entire James Bond story from Fleming in 1961, and with Casino Royale not included in that sale, the two had to settle for Dr.
- Mar 16, 2013 Casino Royale is the first Bond novel, and when it was finally put to screen in 2006, it made for cinematic gold. But it was also a more textbook Bond story arc, and aside from its new darker tone and realistic plot, it still felt like a by the book Bond, which isn't a problem: I just didn't think it was all that mind blowing or unique.
A common complaint laid upon big-budget movies is that they feel like two different movies cobbled together. Films frequently come about thanks to the collision of two or more similar projects - big-budget films especially. To executives, it’s just economics. Got two scripts about similar subject material? Combine them and shoot both for the price of one!
But sometimes, a film really just is an unholy mishmash of ideas, often resulting from multiple writers taking their own pass on the script. Last Action Hero is probably the most famous such film (maybe up until Batman V Superman), but even that movie can’t match the confusing chaos of 1967’s spy spoof Casino Royale. Its six directors struggled to manage warring movie star egos and a confused screenplay seemingly made up of at least three different movies.
In one Casino Royale, James Bond (David Niven!) is a stuttering dandy living a stuffy life of gardening in his advancing years. The death of M breaks him out of retirement, bringing him to reconnect with the daughter of old flame Mata Hari (who, in real life, died in 1917). Together, they infiltrate a SMERSH training centre disguised as an au pair service and uncover a plot to blackmail the world’s leaders with compromising photographs. This Casino Royale was directed primarily by the legendary John Huston and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang director Ken Hughes, with additional scenes by Val Guest (the great, underseen The Day the Earth Caught Fire and a number of Hammer films).
In another Casino Royale, the “James Bond as codename” fan theory, which could well have originated here, is rendered text. Niven’s Bond, now head of MI6 and sick of having a “sex maniac” successor bear his name, orders that all British agents be codenamed James Bond 007, and trained to resist women. One of these Bonds is baccarat expert Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers!), who is sent to the Casino Royale to beat SMERSH agent Le Chiffre (Orson Welles!) at his own game. This version of the movie, which actually includes elements of the source novel, was helmed by Joseph McGrath (The Magic Christian) and Academy Award-winning editor turned director Robert Parrish.
Aug 16, 2007 'Casino Royale' has the answers to all my complaints about the 45-year-old James Bond series, and some I hadn't even thought of. It's not that I didn't love some of the earlier films, like some, dislike others and so on, as that I was becoming less convinced that I ever had to see another one.
These two movies merge, clumsily, thanks to assembly by Val Guest and second-unit direction by stuntman Richard Talmadge, into a broad farce that features a flying saucer; a biological warfare plot; a plot to replace the world’s leaders with doubles; Woody Allen as a wimpy, neurotic Blofeld substitute; a huge casino brawl between secret agents, the military, cowboys and Indians; and an extraordinarily abrupt ending in which the casino gets nuked and everyone goes to heaven (except Allen, who goes to hell). Cue credits.
Guest’s task in assembling the movie was unenviable, to say the least. Based on a screenplay written, at various points, by at least ten screenwriters (including Joseph Heller and Billy Wilder!), Casino Royale contains many ideas that could sustain a movie in and of themselves, but instead battle each other for dominance. The shoot ran months over schedule, at a budget 25% higher than its spectacularly over-the-top contemporary You Only Live Twice - and that’s without even finishing the damn movie. A significant chunk of the plot is simply missing from the film (even with its two-hour-plus running time), and by some accounts, it’s all Peter Sellers’ fault.
Casino Royale 1967 Movie Cast
Sellers was notoriously difficult to deal with on set, clashing both with the comic tone of the film – he wanted to play Bond seriously – and with one of his co-stars. Sellers allegedly rewrote much of his own dialogue, with writer Terry Southern, to make it more serious, but that’s nothing next to his animosity towards Orson Welles. Welles’ famously large ego – he convinced the directors to let him perform magic as Le Chiffre – rubbed Sellers’ personal insecurities the wrong way. On one occasion, Princess Margaret visited the set, and while Sellers went out of his way to flamboyantly welcome her, she largely ignored him in favour of Welles, the bigger star. The two actors refused to work with one another, performing opposite stand-ins for most of their scenes together. In one confrontation, Sellers punched director Joseph McGrath, whose casino sequences were ultimately completed by Robert Parrish. It’s not clear whether Sellers was fired or quit, but either way, he left the production with many scenes yet to be shot, forcing Guest to assemble a movie from incomplete footage.
The result of all this on-set bickering is a film whose protagonist switches from David Niven’s Bond to Sellers’ Tremble, then back again, with little to no warning. Sellers’ exit from the production meant that significant parts of his role were left unshot, necessitating the use of outtakes, still frames, and reused footage to (unsuccessfully) try to bring Sellers’ plotline to a close. More stuff happens offscreen here than in Mockingjay, and there aren’t even any characters to exposit the missing material. That Guest managed to put together and release Casino Royale at all is something of a triumph, given at least a quarter of the film was missing, but he couldn’t save it from its fate as an over-indulgent romp that basically makes no sense.
Though the constant shifts between protagonists and comic tones don’t work, Casino Royale has a few things going for it. Some of the jokes are solid. Hughes’ Berlin sequence is designed and shot in a psychedelic, heavily art-directed fashion, resulting in almost proto-Jodorowskian imagery. Burt Bacharach’s jaunty music - featuring a theme performed by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, and Dusty Springfield doing the first vocal recording of “The Look Of Love” - seems to have inspired Austin Powers more than Monty Norman and John Barry’s Bond themes did. It’s got serious casting clout, as far as Bond spoofs go, featuring 007 alumni like Ursula Andress, Vladek Sheybal, and most notably Nikki Van der Zyl, the unheralded, uncredited voice actor who dubbed leading Bond ladies in nearly every main-series film between Dr. No and Moonraker. And we also have Casino Royale to thank for the directing career of Woody Allen, who was so aghast at the on-set “madhouse” that he decided to direct for himself.
2006’s Casino Royale reboot – made possible by the rights having been absorbed by MGM – effectively squashed the 1967 film. Now, you have to specify “the ‘60s version” or “the spoof version” when referring to the earlier film. But while the Daniel Craig movie is by far the better film, to me Casino Royale will always be that big ol' mess where Peter Sellers gets gunned down by a bagpiper.
Casino Royale 1967 Cast
